


Ghost Repeaters

by beachkid (binz), binz



Category: Doctor Who, The Sentinel
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-11-05
Updated: 2006-11-05
Packaged: 2017-10-07 13:52:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/65768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/binz/pseuds/beachkid, https://archiveofourown.org/users/binz/pseuds/binz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the morning of his ninth birthday, Jimmy Ellison opened the door to his bedroom and stepped out into the woods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghost Repeaters

On the morning of his ninth birthday, Jimmy Ellison opened the door to his bedroom and stepped out into the woods. It was getting dark, the minutes leading into twilight, and he watched the seconds as they counted down, flickering through the cool air and the damp wind, and catching on purple clouds that were ringed with clear, winter sunlight.

The trees around him were thickly clustered, but taller and much skinnier that than those behind his house; the bark was pale, flakey and bitter where it coated the air and his tongue, and he cupped his palm around one hard, twisted trunk. The needles above his head rustled and fell, and a dark flash of fur chattered and dodged, flickering between the branches.

"Sorry," he said, letting go of the trunk and rubbing the bark off on his jeans. It was unexpectedly chalky, and made his teeth squeak, like Styrofoam and the pots his mom used to grow plants in and line along the outside of the windows and the steps of the deck. His socks were getting wet, and he really wished he had put on some shoes before leaving his room, but Sally had been cutting strawberries for his pancakes, small and sweet because it was too early in June for a large crop, and besides, his sneakers were in the hall closet, probably still caked with mud and bits of grass from the night before.

The sky was completely lost to purple now, clouds and the rise of the land and treetops behind, and the only traces of light were hiding in the line of red along the horizon, and the fading warmth held close in the folds of his t-shirt and the emerging underbelly of space.

Jimmy toed at the ground, piled with dead leaves and needles, and cleared a partly dry patch of stone. He eyed it carefully. The surface was grey and flecked through with splotches of white and pink that glittered, and a line of dark, sticky yellow that made his eyes ache and the space between his stomach and his lungs flutter, and he thought that it must run deep into the centre.

He sat down carefully, stuck his hands between his knees to try and warm his fingers, and stared out into the dark. His socks seemed to glow, and he worked at trying to get both feet underneath each other. Bud always said that, if you got lost, you needed to find a place to sit and wait and listen carefully for people who were looking for you, but that you should never get up and go search by yourself. Jimmy didn't think anyone would come looking for him, but he knew how to wait and he knew how to listen, so he might as well do what he could.

When the sound finally came, the first thing he knew was that he had heard it before, and that he never should have forgotten. But he didn't know what it was, or when he might have heard it, or where it was coming from, except from all around and nowhere at all, and that there was _something_ about it that said it would go on and on forever, and that it shouldn't have even been there, except that of course it should.

It was sharp and deep and pressing at his ears from the outside in. It made his jaw hurt, and his skin hum, and was the most beautiful thing in the world, and as terrifying as the whorls between the stars when he stared up and up and there was nothing more than this (until someone touched him; knocked him over; shouted in his ear; screamed and slapped and)

"Oh," Jimmy said. "That's it."

When the big blue box finally, fully, appeared (accompanied by a squish and pop that took place in Jimmy's bones and not his ears as time and space and the bouncing pieces of air reshaped themselves in a smaller place), Jimmy waited until the door opened, and a tall man stepped out before he stood up, shuffling from one cold, wet foot to the other in the shadows cast by the lamp at the box's top.

The man had tennis shoes and a long coat and stared up and around and down, pressing his lips together and pushing his eyebrows up, before Jimmy said "-- um" and their eyes met.

The man managed to look surprised and delighted and suspicious and expectant and entirely like everything was exactly as it should be in the moment that it took Jimmy to blink, because ----

Something was off. There was two of him? No, more than that; many more. Faces upon faces copied into in each other and lit with a multi-faceted light, golden on the inside and broken without, and layers of different voices and scents and sounds when there was only the one of him, really; just the one. With two heartbeats. That was it.

Jimmy tipped his head, finding the extra sound identified and isolated at the back of his mind: an echo, soft and unexpected on the down beat, and tangling on the individual swish and lub with a more complicated, dual rhythm.

"Hello, then," said the man, and his hearts beat steadily on, just like Jimmy's own, save for the accompaniment, and they wrapped around his words. Jimmy shook his head and did his best to look like he wasn't so cold that he felt sick.

"Hi," he said. "Who are you?"

"Ah, well. Straight to the meat of it, then. Good for you; no use dallying around, I always say. Or I think I do, at any rate. I mean to. Although I'm not sure I could really _say_ 'dallying' on a regular basis. Seems like the sort of word that'd you really need a reason to say. Something special. No use wasting a good 'dallying', is there? I'm The Doctor. Who are you?"

"… Jimmy Ellison," Jimmy said, trying to compare the man rocking back and forth on his heels to Dr. Drieson, who was short and wide and had a ring of white hair around his head. But there were different types of doctors, Jimmy knew, and thought that maybe this doctor was like Eddy Morton's uncle who was a doctor and lived in Boston and spent a lot of time in libraries. "Where are we?"

The Doctor peered at him, narrowing wide eyes over a freckly nose, and nodded. "Now that's a tricky question. Where are we? Well." He stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned back to stare at the sky. Jimmy tipped his own head back, and didn't recognise a single star. His eyes burned and his fingers were numb, but he didn't say anything, and hoped that the Doctor couldn't hear his heart, because it was pounding so much it hurt.

"We're at what you could call a 'fixed point'." He rocked back down, and maybe he could hear heartbeats, because he paused, and smiled, and took off his jacket and was suddenly very close as he draped it around Jimmy's shoulders. "Hard to explain while you're chattering," he said, and Jimmy nodded and clutched at the cloth that was soft and _warm_ and smelt like light and half-light and an empty space larger than he could imagine.

"We're somewhere that used to be infinite," the Doctor said, waving a hand at the line of dark on dark that indicated land and sky. "And now. Well. Imagine you're shouting. You have a message that you have to deliver. Really, really need to. Except that, by the time you do, it's changed, and instead of saying "Help! I'm on fire!" you say "There are three seas in all the universe that are orange underwater!" which is true, and exactly what you were saying all along, just like you're still saying "Help! I'm on fire", it's just tuned in on another station. And to deliver your message, to make sure that everyone who needs to know about underwater seas and fire gets to, something has to be there to transfer that message for you. To pass it on. Relay. Bounce." He fluttered a hand in the air, whistling through his teeth. "And here we are."

Jimmy frowned at the stars and then at his feet, his socks now streaked with mud, and then at the line of the Doctor's jaw, half cast in shadow, and half brilliantly white. "So … are you here to transfer on a message?"

"What? Me? Goodness, no. I'm here for the camping. S'mores, you know. Fantastic invention, really."

"Then why am _I_ here?" Jimmy hadn't meant to be as loud as he was, and he hadn't meant to fall silent on the last word, his throat tight and dry and empty.

"And here I thought I was going to get to ask that question," the Doctor said, watching while Jimmy clutched the coat tighter around him. "When did you get here?"

"I don't know," Jimmy shrugged. "Before it got dark. The sun was already setting. I didn't mean to; I just left my room but instead of the hall I came here! And I couldn't get back. The door," he turned in the direction he'd come from, and stared at the dark. "I couldn't get back. So I waited."

He looked up, and the Doctor was peering down at him, shoving on a pair of glasses and suddenly seeming very much like a doctor after all. "Now you are a special person, aren't you, Jimmy Ellison? Human. But special, still. Where are you from, Jimmy? What was the time and date when you left your bedroom?"

Jimmy looked up, and the Doctor waited, so he said: "It was early. I don't know. Before school. June sixth, 1971. Cascade, Washington. It's my birthday," he added, and looked dismayed.

"Well," said the Doctor. "Happy birthday! Great thing, birthdays. Have as many as you can, that's the plan. Try for a few a year; got to spread them out. Here," he placed a hand against Jimmy's back, "come with me."

He led them to the blue box; paused, pulled the coat from Jimmy's shoulders, and pushed open the door. "It's probably best if you close your eyes, now, Jimmy," he said.

Jimmy nodded, but caught a glimpse of the interior (enough that his thoughts stopped, except for a startled 'bigger?' that barely had time to form) when one foot stepped inside, and --- his eyes slammed shut and he stumbled, tipping forward and gasping as strong hands caught him around the arms and pulled him to his feet, his eyes squeezed closed.

He couldn't. He just. His head swam and his skin turned inside out and he thought he might scream because there was more there than there could possibly, possibly be. It didn't make sense, it was beautiful and painful and there were ribbons of light twisting behind his brain, caught and knotted and that _sound_ \-- his hands hit something and his muscles jerked and he lost the ability to breathe because how could he ever be touching something like _this_, and it beat beneath his fingers, took hold of his pulse and wrapped it up with the scent of gold and ozone and darkness and light and he was all there was.

"Can't. I can't," he said, and thought maybe he was crying. "I can't. Can't you, how can't you –"

" – Shh," said the Doctor, and ran a hand down his back, and that was it. That was perfect. And Jimmy could see through the light behind his eyelids and leaned against the blue box's door, letting it hold his weight while the Doctor's hearts beat behind him. "I can, I can. It's why you can that I don't know. Now. I need you to do something for me, Jimmy. Can you, please? I need you to think of your room. Picture it. Picture the door, right before you opened it to the woods. Picture the door and how it feels and the colour of your walls and the way the air smells. Are you doing that, Jimmy? You need to be there, Jimmy. You're in your room. It's your birthday. You're not standing in a TARDIS on a planet where it's never been day. You're in your room. Hold that thought, Jimmy. Hold it tight."

Jimmy nodded, desperately clinging to the taste of Sally's pancakes and fresh strawberries and the pale blue walls of his room and the grey carpet and the bubbles in the paint beneath his hands and the smooth glide of the hinges when he turned the knob, pulled it towards him (There was a shift. Something changed. A moment that stretched and stretched and fell back on itself and exploded somewhere deep beneath his skin) and he fell out into the hallway, eyes flying open in time to catch himself against the wall before he crashed onto the floor.

"Jimmy!" Sally called, and he could hear the creak of her feet on the kitchen floor. "You all right, Jimmy? Breakfast's ready!"

"Coming, Sally," he called, "I'm okay! Just slipped!" and tried to calm his breathing. "Just a sec!" He leaned back and blinked at the ceiling, chasing away the traces of space and not-space flickering beneath his skin, and watched as stars burnt out before his eyes. He reached down and tugged off his socks, wet and dirty and cold, and threw them back into his room.


End file.
